Fandom Snowflake 2020 #3: Building Community, Fic By Fic

Challenge #3 asks us to promote communities, festivals, challenges, and other things that bring us together in fandom.

Here's the extra text:

We all have our favorite places to spend our fandom time, but the world is so huge and there’s so much going on that sometimes it’s hard to find the thing you’re looking for. Maybe you don’t even know where to look. Tell us about your favorite places to get inspired, get involved and get you pushing forward.

What makes fandom more fun is when more people get involved. Tell us where the party is. Or, if you’re stuck in a rut yourself and looking for things to get you out of it, peruse your fellow participant’s posts and see where they go. You never know where you might find your next fandom squee play place!

The recommendations will come first, the philosophy about community and such afterward, so that you don't have to wade through me waxing in long-form if all you want is the recs.

Several of the things that help keep me in a brain state that doesn't spiral downward into feeling like no progress has been nor ever will be made are communities and ideas that have low requirements to what they do.

• awesomeers asks us to think of a single thing that we can be proud of for the day. There are some days where there are more than one, and sometimes there's only one. There's no requirement on how complex the thing is, either - if you are proud because you got out of bed today, that qualifies.


• [There was a thing here, but by request, it's been removed.]


• snowflake_challenge and sunshine_challenge are both really good at getting me into a self-reflective mood and keeping track of knowing where I am and where I've been, so that when I say the view in front of me still looks the same, I can see that there's still been a lot of journey already covered.

I also participate in a significant number of fanworks exchanges and challenges. To the point where someone has said that they are impressed by the number and quantity involved.

• Many of the exchanges I participate in announce themselves either on fandomcalendar or fandom_on_dw.


• Both chocolateboxcomm and trickortreatex run with very small word counts, in the 300-500 range, so if you don't want the 1,000 word minimum, you can make and give a lot of smaller-sized gifts as they come to mind. If you want something that's a bit longer, fandom5k starts at a 5,000 word minimum.


• In addition to exchanges that focus on crossovers, alternate universes, specific pairings, rare or otherwise, or fandoms and canons, rare or otherwise, (they all advertise on the communities above) there are a few ideas that I want to highlight specifically as neat and that use interesting prompts. fic_corner is a fic focused on written works whose canons are intended for teenagers and younger. intoabar is specifically about creating works where Character Z from one canon walks into a bar and meets or has business with Character Q fro a different canon. fortune_favors just started, and uses Tarot cards (each round focused on a different deck) as the prompts to create works with. poetry_fiction uses lines of poetry from a featured poet as the prompts for works to happen. All of these are worthwhile, if you are so inclined to writing exchange fic.


• Final and special mention goes to fictional_fans, which was first created as a bit of a how-to and for examples for people to see how Dreamwidth works and the things you can do with it, but one of the things that Dreamwidth does well is take examples and run with them, so in addition to being an example community, it's also become an all-fandoms place to talk and promote and otherwise provide content. You might find all sorts of interesting things there. Or provide the interesting things yourself!

Those are all of my recommendations for communities on Dreamwidth (and one community that moves places).

( Long-form waxing begins here )